Erik the Exasperated

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I haven’t had many thoughts that haven’t been better expressed elsewhere. But I have to draw attention to a remark of Glenn Reynolds, which seems to me to express an important and little-noticed point:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

I dub this Reynolds’ Law: “Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Continuing to rely on climate-model warming projections based on high, model-derived values of climate sensitivity skews the cost-benefit analyses and estimates of the social cost of carbon. This can bias policy decisions. The implications of the lower values of climate sensitivity in our paper, as well as similar other recent studies, is that human-caused warming near the end of the 21st century should be less than the 2-degrees-Celsius “danger” level for all but the IPCC’s most extreme emission scenario.

This slower rate of warming—relative to climate model projections—means there is less urgency to phase out greenhouse gas emissions now, and more time to find ways to decarbonize the economy affordably. It also allows us the flexibility to revise our policies as further information becomes available.

Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future. Recognizing those limits, rather than ignoring them, will lead to a more sober and ultimately more productive discussion of climate change and climate policies. To do otherwise is a great disservice to climate science itself.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/climate-science-is-not-settled-1411143565

As for the hockey stick, Mr. Plait repeats long-discredited defenses of the graph, including the suggestion that other selections of data have confirmed it. Surely he knows (if only because it is in my article) that these confirmations rely on including Tiljander’s lake sediments or bristlecone pines, but that if you leave these now-debunked data sets out, then the effect vanishes. Please read Climate Audit to verify this. Here’s a quote:

“As CA readers are aware, the ‘big news’ of Mann et al 2008 was its claim to have got a Hockey Stick without Graybill’s bristlecone chronologies (camouflaged as a ‘no-dendro’ reconstruction). CA readers are aware that this claim depended on their use of contaminated modern portion of the Tiljander sediments and that the original claims for a ‘validated’ no-dendro reconstruction prior to 1500 fell apart, even though no retraction or corrigendum to the original Mann et al (PNAS 2008) has been issued.As we learned (from an inline comment by Gavin Schmidt in July 2010), Mann et al have conceded that these claims fell apart, but did so using a “trick” (TM- climate science.) Instead of acknowledging the false assertions at the journal in which the assertions were made (PNAS), they acknowledged the failure of the no-Tiljander no-bristlecone reconstructions deep in the Supplementary Information of a different paper (Mann et al, Science 2009) – a trick for which the term ‘Mike’s PNAS trick’ is surely appropriate (though the term ‘Mike’s Science trick’ also merits consideration.)”

Friday, October 10, 2014

In a recent Gallup poll, 80 percent of Americans believe abortions in the third trimester should be illegal. In a Huffington Post-funded poll, respondents favored a federal ban on abortion after 20 weeks by a margin of 59 to 30 percent. In Quinnipiac University Poll, 55 percent supported a ban restricting abortions on viable unborn children – with women, whose views we should respect, supporting the ban by a 60-25 margin.http://thefederalist.com/2014/10/09/why-doesnt-mark-udall-have-to-answer-for-his-extremism/

Saturday, August 23, 2014

This is exactly what we’ve been talking about: “climate change” is being used as a means to push far left Progressive (nice fascist) Big Government policies. Control of economies, control of people, restrictions on business, restrictions on private investment, government doing it all, taxing people out the ying yang, government owning businesses (particularly infrastructure and energy, which gives Government control over your life). Look back at that quote from Klein again

“When climate change deniers claim that global warming is a plot to redistribute wealth, it’s not (only) because they are paranoid. It’s also because they are paying attention.”

We are paying attention. To bad the average brain dead Liberal isn’t. They might see the reality, and understand that they will not be immune to the fascist tendencies of their Warmist leaders.

—Ace

* the guarantee that nothing she says will be recorded by any means, video or audio, and that the only record of her appearance will be a stenographer's transcription

I think the reason for that last one is that she doesn't want video of her speeches getting out and thereby ruining the Money Farm that is her public speaking business.

Because I don't think any of her speeches are new. I think she's giving these people basically the same canned speech, with a couple of paragraphs about some timely event. But mostly, just the same damn speech every time, at $225,000 per.

So what are these people actually paying for if they're just getting her canned campaign speech?